Some people get completely caught up in it, apparently oblivious to the fact that it is simply tricks, enabled by sleight of hand and a steady line of distracting chatter. These people just eat up magic acts.

Others are eaten up by the fact that they cannot figure out how the extraordinary feats are accomplished.

Guess where I stand on this one? Bad magic acts bore me. Good magic ticks me off.

Josh Lozoff knows some tricks, but he also knows a different kind of magic. When I went over to the Mellow Mushroom, where he performs every Friday evening from 7 to 9, he did some card tricks -- they ticked me off.

He had me place my finger on a card, a card I had seen. While he moved other cards under my card, he talked to me, telling me to concentrate and make sure he wasn't moving my card. I was sure he had not changed anything under my finger, but of course when I turned the card over, it was a different card than I had put there.

But then I started talking to him and learned that the real magic is in his very different lifestyle.

Lozoff's vision of life is evolved far beyond his 30 years of age, but throughout his life, he seems to have known a different path to take. He has even found a life-partner with whom to make the trip.

Lozoff was born in Michigan, but his parents, Bo and Sita Lozoff, then moved to Chapel Hill where he spent most of his childhood, except between the ages of 6 and 9 when they lived in Colorado. "We moved back, and my parents built by hand the house I grew up in," Lozoff said. After he graduated from Friend's School, he headed out to Los Angeles, where he studied acting and pursued a professional acting career. He didn't do too badly either, landing parts in television and movie productions. For several seasons he played a recurring character on "Cheers," and played a prominent role in the 1995 movie "Clueless."

"When I found myself losing my passion for show business, I quit and moved back here," he said.

He came full circle, too, once again living in the house his parents built in rural Orange County near Durham. But this time, instead of living with his parents, he lives there with his wife, Melissa, whom he met in Los Angeles.

Lozoff met Melissa in an acting class in 1994. "I had just broken up with someone and had decided I'd had enough of men -- no more men," Melissa said. She said that Josh assisted acclaimed drama teacher Joan Darling, but since she was in anti-men mode, she didn't pay him any attention until one day when his stage presence lit something in her.

"There was this really boring scene on stage and he popped in for a brilliant cameo and that was it -- I wanted him!" Melissa said. She grew up in Taber, Alberta, Canada, and, like her husband, left after graduating from high school to pursue acting in L.A. She spent eight years at it. After meeting Josh, the two dated for several years then broke up and Josh moved here.

"I lost my passion," Josh said. "I recognized that I'm not a one-career person. At least not at this time in my life." He started working part-time with Orange County as an Emergency Medical Technician. And then he turned on the television one night and saw David Blaine in his first television special and something magical happened.

"He didn't do anything original, but he did his magic with a different personality," Josh said. "He was focused as much or more on the audience reaction. I called Melissa on the West Coast and told her I'd just seen the most amazing thing on TV."

He said he felt called to do magic. He had seen in Blaine something he had never witnessed with a magic act -- he wasn't wearing a tuxedo; He got out of the way of the magic. This was something he wanted to do.

"I want people walking away talking about the amazing experience they just had, not the amazing guy they just saw," said Lozoff, who uses cards and coins in his acts -- no rabbits, no hat, no pyrotechnics.

"I never thought four years ago I would be performing magic," he said. "But I always try to be open to whatever might come in my future. I have a strong spiritual foundation based on faith, not fear. If you fear the future, to some extent it represents a lack of faith."

"Our society devalues being content with who we are and where we are. We don't value contentedness in our culture. We are manipulated by those who have money to make; Content people don't buy new cars or new soda all the time. Powerful forces in our society are dependent upon us not feeling at peace. We have to be mavericks -- rebels -- to look around at that and decide to step back a bit."

Soon after magic entered his life, Melissa re-entered. "Acting didn't make me happy," she said. She was interested in writing children's literature -- and in being with Lozoff. She moved here in February 1999 and they married in May. "I had no idea what to do here," she said. So she started writing and sold some stories to children's magazines. Melissa now runs a program teaching moviemaking classes for kids.

She and Josh live his philosophy. Neither has a full-time job -- they both have two or three part-time jobs. Besides teaching movie-making to young people and writing, Melissa provides day-care for children. Besides performing magic and working as an EMT, Josh does some construction work and helps his parents out at the Human Kindness Foundation they established in 1974 to help prison inmates in their spiritual journey. Located in rural Orange County, the foundation has evolved into a spiritual community where people can stay to attend workshops or to simply work on their own journey. Obviously, Josh proves that the apple does not fall far from the tree, and he credits his parents for his different way of seeing things and living his life.

When asked if he believes in magic, Lozoff speaks of time spent learning from the people of Guatemala and Peru as he performed there and of sharing with men in a maximum-security prison. He does believe in magic, but he knows that what he does is something he has learned, an illusion that provokes a magical response in others.

He has studied at the prestigious Magic Castle in Hollywood, but he's more impressed with the person on the street, the at-risk youth, the prisoner, the monks at a Franciscan convent -- all of whom he has performed for.

"I'm beginning to see magic everywhere," Lozoff said.

Yeah, me, too. It's a lot easier to simply give in than to try to figure out how the heck he moved that card from under my finger.